Books May 1992

The great Galician novel

A review of The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán.

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The House of Ulloa. Translated from the Spanish, with an introduction, by Paul O’Prey & Lucia Graves. Penguin, 275 pages, $8.95 paper

The House of Ulloa. Translated from the Spanish by Roser Caminals-Heath. University of Georgia Press, 323 pages, $35

reviewed by Lauren Weiner

After the end of the Golden Age, and until the advent of García Lorca, Spain lacked much of its former literary luster. From the late 1600s to the civil war of this century, it was almost as if the country had turned in upon itself to brood over its faded imperial splendor. Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921), a well-traveled Spanish aristocrat, autodidact, and standard-bearer of liberal monarchism, believed that the cure for Spain’s cultural insulation was to import naturalism from across the Pyrenees—or at least those aspects of naturalism that a devout Catholic could accept. Pardo...